Simple to use Get Excerpts with Thumbnail plugin uses meta data of wordpress post, to retrieve thumbnail image. It also uses another plug-in named Content Extract by Rob Shumann, to retrieve excerpt from POST. You need install Content Extract plugin before start working with this plugin.

Inspite of having found numerous plugins to get excerpts along with thumbnail images in Wordpress plugin directory. I have written this plugin to reduce number of requests that are made to MySQL database while fetching data.

== Installation ==
Install Content Extract by Rob Shumann, before installing this plugin.
The plugin is simple to install:

1. Download the zip file, from wordpress plugin directory
2. Unpack the zip.
3. Extract zip file and upload directory present in zip file to the `wp-content/plugins` directory on your WordPress installation.
4. Activate plugin
5. Go to Settings -> Get Excerpt with Thumbnail page, to change configuration for the plug-in.

Configuration of Plug-in:

Goto Settings -> Get Excerpt With Thumbnail link in your wordpress admin page.
Following four elements need to be configured.
1) Thumbnail CSS Class -> this is .css class name to be used by this plug-in. By default, CSS class name is displayed as ‘imgstyle’, change this to your desired class name and make sure it is defined in .css file of your wordpress theme.
2) More Text -> link that appears next to excerpt to read full post.
3) Post Length -> Inspite of reading entire post to retrieve excerpt, plugin just reads number of characters entered by you in this field.
Note: Once an excerpt is generated by this plugin, it will be stored in excerpt field of your wordpress post.
4) Excerpt Length -> Length of excerpt to be displayed.
Note: Always make suer Post Length is greater than or equal to Excerpt Length.

Sample usage of this plugin:

while (have_posts()) {
the_post();
$data = getExcerptsWithThumbnail();
echo $data['post_thumbnail'] . ‘<h5>’ . $data['post_title'] . ‘</h5>’ . $data['post_excerpt'] ;
}

In above code snippet, you can see getExcerptsWithThumbnail() function returns an array.
code snippet uses <h5> tag to display title of the post, you can use any of the style you want, for the presentation of thumbnail image along with excerpt.

Screen shot of the plugin, when Thumbnail Image position is used as ‘float:left’

Screen shot of plugin, when Thumbnail Image position is used as ‘float:right’

Get Excerpt with Thumbnail plugin just gives data, presentation of this data on theme pages is left to theme developer.

Reference: see category or tag pages on SearchAndhra.com to check how this plugin is used.

Please place your queries as comments to this post, so that i can reply to you.

The requirement came when we are developing a theme for our site SearchAndhra.com, where in we need to display latest posts belongs to a specific category, in our home page and also in single post page. After checking various plugins available for WordPress we coded this plugin.

The main motive behind coding this plugin is to reduce number of queries fired against MySQL database, while listing titles of latest posts.

List Latest Posts Titles plugin uses only one query per call, to retrieve titles of latest posts belongs to a particular category.

You can download and install this List Latest Posts Titles plugin from WordPress Plugin Directory.

Post your comments if you require any further information regarding this plugin, we are ready to help you out.

Born in December 2004, eAccelerator is a fork of Turck MMCache project.

you can download eAccelerator at http://eaccelerator.net/

Installation steps for eAccelerator on linux environment:

Requirements

apache >= 1.3, mod_php >= 4.1, autoconf, automake, libtool, m4

Copy downloaded copy of your eAccelerator version onto any location of your server, (generally it will be /usr/local/src) and continue with following steps.

OR

Download and extract the source for eAccelerator.
# cd /usr/local/src/
# wget http://bart.eaccelerator.net/source/0.9.5.3/eaccelerator0.9.5.3.tar.bz2
# tar jxvf eaccelerator-0.9.5.3.tar.bz2
# cd eaccele*

Step 1) Compiling eAccelerator

execute following commands in the order.
a) export PHP_PREFIX=”/usr”
b) $PHP_PREFIX/bin/phpize
c) ./configure –enable-eaccelerator=shared –with-php-config=$PHP_PREFIX/bin/php-config
d) make

Note: You must specify the real prefix where PHP is installed in the “export” command. It may be “/usr” “/usr/local”, or something else.
Know your PHP installed location on your server, by running phpinfo() script.

On successfull compilation, there should be a “eaccelerator.so” file in the modules subdirectory of the eAccelerator source directory

Note: (Only on Errors while installing eAccelerator)
i) On some server PHP installations, phpize may not found, then error will come as ‘phpize: command not found’,

in this case you need install phpize with following command. (Command may vary depending on version of linux)

yum install php-devel

ii) If you get following error while running command ./configure
configure: error: no acceptable C compiler found in $PATH
you need to install c Compiler, run following command

yum install gcc

Step 2) Install eAccelerator

run following command

a) make install

This command will copy “eaccelerator.so” into PHP extensions directory.

Step 3) Configure eAccelerator

eAccelerator can be installed both as Zend or PHP extension.

For eaccelerator > 0.9.1, if you have /etc/php.d directory, you should copy eaccelerator.ini inside and modify default values if you need, otherwise edit your php.ini (/etc/php.ini)

To install as Zend extension:

zend_extension=”/usr/lib/php4/eaccelerator.so”
eaccelerator.shm_size=”32″
eaccelerator.cache_dir=”/tmp/eaccelerator”
eaccelerator.enable=”1″
eaccelerator.optimizer=”1″
eaccelerator.check_mtime=”1″
eaccelerator.debug=”0″
eaccelerator.filter=”"
eaccelerator.shm_max=”0″
eaccelerator.shm_ttl=”0″
eaccelerator.shm_prune_period=”0″
eaccelerator.shm_only=”0″
eaccelerator.compress=”1″
eaccelerator.compress_level=”9″

If you use thread safe build of PHP you must use “zend_extension_ts” instead
of “zend_extension”.

To install as PHP extension:

extension=”eaccelerator.so”
eaccelerator.shm_size=”32″
eaccelerator.cache_dir=”/tmp/eaccelerator”
eaccelerator.enable=”1″
eaccelerator.optimizer=”1″
eaccelerator.check_mtime=”1″
eaccelerator.debug=”0″
eaccelerator.filter=”"
eaccelerator.shm_max=”0″
eaccelerator.shm_ttl=”0″
eaccelerator.shm_prune_period=”0″
eaccelerator.shm_only=”0″
eaccelerator.compress=”1″
eaccelerator.compress_level=”9″

Note: default value for eaccelerator.shm_size is ‘0′, in this case shared memory size will be taken as default value of OS. you can set it to any size you need.

Step 4) Creating Cache Directory

In this step you will create eaccelerator cache directory, that is configured in Step 3.
Default value for this /tmp/eaccelerator’

a) mkdir /tmp/eaccelerator
b) chmod 0777 /tmp/eaccelerator

Note: Generally it will be a good idea to use some other directory, otherthan ‘tmp/eaccelerator’, as this directory will be deleted on some servers while system reboot.

Step 5) restart the web server for eAccelerator to function.
(generally command will be: service httpd restart)

Step 6) To monitor eAccelerator functioning, you can perform following steps.

a) After restart web server, go into directory ‘/tmp/eaccelerator’ you can see cache pages created under some directories in that folder.

b) or you can perform phpinfo()

c) or else you can copy ‘control.php’ available in eAccelerator source folder on to your web document root.

Change user name and password in control.php to access eAccelerator control panel.

Change path of ‘eaccelerator.allowed_admin_path’ to web document root to fully monitor eAccelerator functioning in Control Panel.

Ex: if control.php is at location /var/vhost/aaayy.com/httpdocs/control.php, then

eaccelerator.allowed_admin_path = /var/vhost/aaayy.com/httpdocs

you need to restart web server, for this change.

Open any file as shown in the below snippet, and read data and pass it to gzencode() function.

If the file to be gzip is of larger size, read file in chunks to avoid memory errors, while reading file.

More info on gzip can be found at PHP Manual in http://php.net

Tremendous compressing achieved with following snippet.
function gzipSitemap($fileIndex)
{
 $file_to_gzip = “readme.txt”; //any type of file
        $gz_dest_file = “readme.txt.gz”;
 $fh = fopen($file_to_gzip, ‘r’) or die(“Can’t read file”);
 $fp = fopen($gz_dest_file, “w”) or die(“Can’t create .gz file”);
    while($theData = fread($fh, 5000))
 {
  $gzdata = gzencode($theData, 9);
  fwrite($fp, $gzdata);
 }
    fclose($fp);
    fclose($fh);
}